I'm one of those rarities at the site Atrios likes to playfully refer to as the Great Orange Satan--a three-digit user. I'm the 842nd user to have signed up for the site when it went to the registered user system. To get a sense of scale, the site now has well over 120,000 registered users (including trolls).

But over the last two to three months, I've pretty much stopped commenting, stopped posting diaries, generally withdrawn from the community. Part of the reason is related to trying to build the readership here, and because I've become far more interested in feminist and GLBT issues, and while there are voices at Kos who deal with those things, I've found the smaller blogs who specialize in those things to be far more edifying.

But I think a larger reason can be illustrated by the recommended diaries section this morning. Three of today's top ten diaries--and this is some of the most coveted real estate in the blogosphere--are titled "I will not vote for Hillary in the general election," "If she is the nominee, I will vote for Hillary," and "The Moral Emptiness of the 'I won't vote for Hillary' diaries."

I just have no interest in moral posturing over various candidates. I'm at a point in US politics where any Democrat running for President is better, by a wide margin, than any Republican or so-called Independent. (Note to the Unity 08 folks--if you're really serious about forming a unity ticket, you might want to actually reach across party lines instead of talking to a center-right mayor and a staunchly conservative Senator.)

But it's clear that lots of people in that community do want to fight over that stuff--getting a diary to the rec list is tough, increasingly so since the community hit 6 figures--so to have 3 on essentially the same subject shows a huge amount of interest. Just not to me.

I still drop by to read the stories, but I've long since lost my trusted user status, and I'm not likely to try to get it back any time soon.